Ashes to Ashes (22 page)

“The cards, then?” asked Rebecca.

“We don’t know that who took the mazer had anything to do with the cards.”

“Occam’s razor,” muttered Michael. At the sheriff’s puzzled look he explained, “The simplest explanation is the most likely— the same person did both the theft and the cards.”

Warren drained his glass, the ice cubes tinkling together. He delicately wiped his moustache. Rebecca’s dress turned slowly in the draft. The place always has a draft, she thought. Funny little breezes licking the back of her hypersensitive neck.

Steve sauntered in the door. The only indication that he was aware of the three pairs of eyes watching him was his exaggeratedly relaxed walk. He got a glass, ran water in it, drank, sauntered out.

“I’m sorry, Miss Reid,” said Warren as Steve’s footsteps passed through the entry and out the front door. “I know this has been real upsetting for you. But until something else happens, we’re just going to have to leave it where we are now. Not that anything else should happen. Chances are you’ll be able to finish out your work in peace and quiet.”

“I hope so,” said Rebecca.

Michael leaped down and headed for the door. “Speakin’ of which, all I’ve done the day is turn out some cabinets.”

“I’d better be going, too,” Warren said. “Keep me posted.” Rebecca escorted him to the door and stood watching him drive away.

The sunlight of the cool Indian summer morning was so rich she could almost gather it in her hands. She’d have to collect Michael and go for another walk. On yesterday’s jaunt into the woods they’d found an old mill; after exploring that for an hour she’d had to wash her Nikes. But all Michael had had to do, grinning condescendingly, was hose down his wellies.

Steve was raking the drifts of sodden red leaves into piles on the lawn. If Rebecca squinted she could make out the interstate, the cars moving pricks of light beyond the bare branches of the trees. Odd, how at night the headlights from the farm road outside the gates would reflect on the dovecote. She’d seen it several times now.

Darnley prowled through the bare sticks tufted with an occasional orange petal that had been the marigolds. Slash sniffed around the mausoleum. Wouldn’t it be nice to be an animal, Rebecca thought, and have no worries?

Slash spotted Darnley, emitted a bass woof, and churned his long legs into a gallop. Darnley jumped straight up, spun in midair, and streaked for the house. Rebecca danced out of his way. On second thought, she told herself, at least she wasn’t in peril of her life. She slammed the door in Slash’s face, locked it, and went back into the kitchen for her dress.

Rebecca took her dress to her room and collected her own spiral notebook filled with notes and sketches. If she didn’t have the Erskine letter, she could at least study Mary’s needlework, letters from contemporaries, and Rizzio’s guitar with its odd harmonic of memory. Her dissertation wasn’t on the letter specifically, after all, but on the Queen of Scots’ role in 16th century politics. And yet she needed bells and whistles, like the proof of King James’s ancestry one way or the other.

Michael was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the large fourth floor bedroom, leafing through a photograph album. The shorter strands of his hair framed his face that in contemplation seemed less sharply angled; the longer strands lay with deceptive softness over the neckband of his shirt.

Dorothy was in the fifth floor bedroom fluffing the haunted pillow so forcefully she must’ve been trying to exorcise the impression of Elspeth’s body. On the sixth floor Phil was replacing a bit of wood paneling that had shrunk away from the bricks of the fireplace. “I’ll paint it tomorrow,” he told Rebecca. “By January it should blend right in.”

“Looks great,” she told him. And, with a deep breath, “Mr. Pruitt, I’m afraid Dorothy wasn’t supposed to give you a key to the front door.”

He blinked at her, giving her no help.

“What with all the legal considerations,” she blundered on, “only Michael and I can have keys. So if I could have yours back again, please.”

Wordlessly Phil pulled a key chain from his pocket and detached the door key. Dangling from the chain was a plastic photo holder displaying a picture of a chubby-faced baby and a woman with the straight, parted hair of the late sixties. The mysterious Mrs. Pruitt and Steve, no doubt. “Thank you,” Rebecca said, and put the key into her pocket with the one she’d wrested from Dorothy.

“Miss Reid,” Phil began. He glanced at his worn workboots, jangling the key chain. “Miss Reid, was that the sheriff downstairs?”

“Yes.”

“Has he found that fancy cup thing yet?”

Rebecca took a step backward; he should’ve been staring resentfully at her. She’d called the police down on his son and a search party into his home. “No,” she said, and added, “Warren doesn’t think Steve took it.”

“He didn’t. But if the boy needs to make some restitution for what he did to your room… . “Phil ducked again, embarrassed but forcing himself to see it through.

Rebecca visualized Washington with his little hatchet, “Papa, I cannot tell a lie.”

“No,” she said. “That’s all over and done with.”

He looked up. Those basset hound eyes made her feel like he’d caught her pushing old ladies into gutters and stealing candy from babies. “He was just playing a prank. He and his little friend— they didn’t mean no harm. Kids will be kids, you know. He wouldn’t hurt no one. He didn’t saw through that chair. I showed it to the officers who came to the house.” He stopped for breath, an entire paragraph of speech almost too much for him.

“It’s all over and done with,” she repeated, wishing desperately for something she could say that would comfort the man.

Unless Phil was acting, burbled that irritatingly analytical part of her mind. He could be attacking with pathos before he could be attacked with facts. Maybe he was plotting with Steve, or with Dorothy, or with little green men from Mars. “Thank you,” Rebecca said, and rushed for the staircase.

Dorothy was arranging the cut-glass bottles. Michael hadn’t budged. Rebecca returned to the kitchen, gave the broth a quick stir, and pulled the laundry from the dryer. She put the door keys in the drawer beneath the phone.

The diaries sat on the table. If she stopped to read them, on the off chance they mentioned the Erskine letter, she wouldn’t be working on anything else. If Michael found the letter he’d give it to her, if only so he could strut his knowledge.

There was the book with the photograph and the ledger sheet. There was the one that contained the scrap in James’s handwriting she had found in the desk: “— ever problem you are having you have brought upon yourself. I cannot help you any more than I already have. Your threats are… ”

What was not there was the key to the mausoleum.

Rebecca stood, her hands on her hips, staring at the tabletop. She bent and studied the floor. Neither offered any answers. Warren had been looking at the key. Michael had left the room first. She’d shut the door behind Warren and had seen both Phil and Dorothy upstairs. Steve had only been in the kitchen when they were there, too, and that was the only time the front door had been left open all day. She hadn’t the foggiest idea whether the key had been there when she came in to get her dress.

Michael might have taken the key. So might Warren. But why? Eric had said, “If anyone breaks into the mausoleum, we’ll know we have a bunch of weirdos on our hands.”

Rebecca shoved the chairs against the table. First thing to do was to ask Michael. Then— well, she’d already included Warren on her list of suspects, just on general principles. For all she knew Dorothy and Warren were really Heather’s parents, or were conspiring to sell her into white slavery, or had manufactured both Heather and Steve in some basement laboratory.

She was suddenly very aware of being the outsider. “I knew it’d been too quiet around here,” she said aloud, “like the calm before the storm.” She stamped out of the room and up the stairs.

Michael was surrounded by scrapbooks, folders bulging with papers, a mail gauntlet, a miniature of Mary of Guise, and a cream pitcher shaped like a cow. “Guess what?” called Rebecca as she strode into the room.

He looked up, his expression partly annoyed, partly amused, but not at all surprised. “I’d really rather not.”

“The key to the mausoleum is gone.” Rebecca cleared several squashed cardboard boxes from the bed and sat down. “I don’t suppose you took it.”

Michael looked at her with his patented guileless gaze. “I don’t suppose I did. Did you?”

“Then why would I be asking you about it?” He shrugged, as if to say her plots were unfathomable. She really ought to be flattered, she reflected wryly, that at least someone suspected her of having a plot. “Did you see either Phil or Dorothy go downstairs?”

“Neither of them came down these stairs, at the least.”

“Maybe Warren took the key.”

“Maybe he wants to keep it safe. We’ve no good record about the keys here, mind you. And his friend James is planted there in the doocot.”

True enough. Rebecca said, “Did you get the impression he was trying to cover up for Steve and Heather, not to mention Dorothy?”

“He’s known the kids since they were weans, and he’s probably an old school pal of Dorothy’s. Why shouldn’t he protect them? As long as he’s told them to leave us alone, he can do what he wants wi’ them.”

Rebecca exhaled. “All right. Say I stop wondering why they picked on me and let it go. What about the mazer?”

“Let Lansdale and Adler decide,” Michael said. “They’re the ones responsible. We only have— what? Six or seven weeks left to go through this mixtie-maxtie. The museum is keen on gettin’ it all, not just the mazer.”

“But we’re missing another key. What next? Is the mysterious perpetrator going to back a U-Haul up to the door and cart away Mary’s sarcophagus? Has he or she already found and absconded with the Forbes treasure and the Erskine letter?”

“Come off it. The museum’ll no be wantin’ the sarcophagus. There is no treasure, and there’s no guarantee there’s a letter.”

“So you have it all compartmentalized?” asked Rebecca. “You worry about your own territory, let everyone else worry about his?”

He offered her his sweetest, most irritatingly condescending smile. “You’re always tongue-waggin’ about me doin’ my job. So I’m doin’ it.”

“Give me the pip, why don’t you?” Rebecca demanded.

“I’m no chargin’ you for it, am I?” His smile broadened into a grin, every gleaming tooth a testament to the British National Health Service.

She bounced to her feet, stalked out of the room and up the stairs. As soon as she was around the bend in the stairwell she stopped, swearing and laughing at the same time. Such confrontations were as much a part of the background static as the undercurrent of the supernatural. Their skirmishes always ended the same way, a cloud of dust and verbiage but no conclusion. She had to admire him for protecting his territory so fiercely.

So they’d inadvertently glimpsed the vulnerable bellies hidden beneath each other’s spiky shells. She hadn’t had enough glimpses beneath his shell to keep her from wondering if it also concealed harassment, embezzlement, and theft. Michael had said he’d been frightened enough that night in the pantry to cut his losses and push off home. But what losses did he have to cut? His job at the museum was waiting. Unless he expected some greater return on his investment of time and energy than a visit to the United States.

Rebecca walked on past the fifth floor and John Forbes’s painted glare. Probably it was simply the same obstinacy that had made her persevere through the alarms and excursions of her first days here that had kept Michael here, too. His pride would never let him return to the Museum empty-handed.

“What is it?” said Dorothy from the sixth floor, and Rebecca jumped.

Phil said, “A loose brick. A hidey-hole. I’ll go tell them.”

“No, keep your voice down. Let’s see what’s in it first.”

“What if it’s some kind of artyfact thing?”

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” said Dorothy.

Time for reinforcements. Rebecca was not the only outsider here. She skimmed back down the stairs and into the bedroom. “Phil’s found a secret cache in the fireplace,” she said to Michael. “Want to see?”

He dumped the scrapbook and was out of the room so quickly he would’ve mashed her against the door frame if she hadn’t dodged. She clung to his heels all the way up the stairs.

The ballroom’s white walls and pale hardwood floor glistened in the sunlight. A cold draft moved like a sluggish ocean current about ankle height. As usual, Elspeth’s window was open. The air was fresher now that Phil had fixed the windows and cleared away the birds’ nests in the tiny room below the platform. Now the occasional blackbird coasted by the ballroom windows, its beady eyes staring indignantly but futilely inside.

Dorothy stood in front of the fireplace, arms crossed, a dust rag dangling from one hand. Phil squatted, prying at a brick about two feet above the hearth. It inched painfully away from its neighbors with a shrill sound like chalk scraping across a blackboard.

Rebecca said, “Can you get it out?”

Dorothy spun around, her hand clutching at her heart, eyes bulging.

“I was just outside on the stairs,” Rebecca said, tempted to imitate Michael’s sweetly condescending expression. Michael himself bent, his hands resting on his knees, so close to Phil that he almost got an elbow in the eye. The fringe of his hair hung over his face, but Rebecca was ready to swear his expression was more intense than simple curiosity.

With a patter of dust Phil levered the brick far enough away from the others so that his fingers could get a grip on it. He jerked it out. He and Michael bumped heads looking into the aperture. Dorothy craned over their shoulders. Rebecca hung back, arms crossed, toe tapping on the floor.

Michael reached into the hole. He extracted a string of beads and a crumpled piece of paper. Dorothy took the paper from his hand and smoothed it out on the mantelpiece. It was an advertisement from a magazine of the turn of the century, an elegantly dressed woman touting soap.